Earth Care
Care for all living and non-living things, soils, species, diversity, atmosphere, forests, waters and animals. When designing aim to provide for all living systems and their nutrient cycles so they can continue and multiply.
People Care
Design so people are provided their needed ressources. Earth Care includes People Care. Micro-level: Care for yourself and your community around you. Macro-level: Care for humanity, aim to leave a legacy with regenerative traditions/festivals/etc.
Future Care
Limit cosumption and use and regenerate in a way so that future generations can continue and are able to meet their needs.
Mollison’s principles
- Work with nature
- The problem is the solution
- The least changes for longest effects
- Yields are limitless
- Everything gardens
Holmgren’s principles
- Observe and interact
- Catch and store energy
- Obtain a yield
- Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
- Use and value renewable ressources
- Produce no waste
- Design from pattern to detail
- Use small and slow solutions
- Integrate rather than segregate
- Use and value diversity
- Use edges and value the marginal
- Creatively use and respond to change
Matt’s principles
Additionally to Holmgren’s principles Matt’s also focus on the social context:
- Observe & reflect
- Only use what you need, otherwise don’t
- Reduce waste & pollution (this includes energy)
- Make use of cooperation
- Let life intervene and adapt/learn from it
- Always return when you take
- Use nature’s striving for syntropy and homeostasis
- Apply the ethics to landscape and society
Birch’s principles
- Nothing in nature lasts forever
- Continuation of life depends on cycles of essential elements (C, O, N, S, P)
- Extinction occurs with very high or very low populations
- The ability of survival and reproduction of species is usually only limited by one or two limiting factors out of a complex network with many
- Our ability to alter the surface of the earth is greater than our abilty to foresee the consequences of such actions
- Every living organisms has an instrinsic worth, apart from their value to humans
Preservation’s Principles
- Empowerment
- Purity & Preservation
- Choice
- Stabilty
- Self-regulation
- Yields
- Systems Yield
- Role of Life
Global Threats
- Soil degradation
- Deforestation
- Pollution
- Water scarcity
- Ocean acidification
- Extinction of species
- Climate instability
- Human disconnection
- Population imbalance
Preservation
- Empower humans to empower their surrounding eco systems to restore themselves.
- Preserve natural reservates and keep intact ecosystems at all cost.
- Give people/plants choices to empower them instead of oppsosing our view on them.
- Maintaining and supporting diversity leads to stability of a (eco) system.
- Take responsibility and reflect on yourself to neither cause harm to the Earth nor others.
- Anything can be a yield, it’s up to your imagination.
- Holistic view on what you get out of that system.
- Life is faciliting yields. Make it abundant. diverse and strive.
Threats
- Lost more than 80% top soil (50 years left) -> we need to regenerate our soils
- Climate change and human made deforestation -> stop deforestation and add new diversity to forests
- Pollution destroying ecosystems -> Rethink our use and partner with organisms that can metabolite plastic.
- Water harvesting to tackle water shortages.
- Marine ecosystems dying -> Reverse acidification
- Every lost species is a threat to their eco system -> Protect them.
- Stop CO2 emissions.
- Social permaculture to get people to communicate again non-violently
- Critically low (rural areas, indigenous people) and high populations (cities)
Five Steps for a regenerative Future
- Build soil
- Grow forests
- Clean and restore all waters
- Restore and regenerate bio diversity
- Re-wild human culture
Lenses for designing
Everytime you design look through the different lenses:
Is it Earth/People/Future Care?
Does it break any principle of preservation?
Did I apply Mollison/Holmgren/Matt’s principle when designing?
(e.g. “this doesn’t empower enough people” -> improve the design)
History of Permaculture
Permanent Agriculture (Tree Crops from R. Smith) Design System by Mollison that was later broadenend and applied to Housing, Culture and more by Mollison and Holmgren (one of his students). Techniques and values taken from the longest lasting indigenous cultures.
Discussion about the formulation of the last priciple because of political connotations, still everyone means the same thing apart from semantics.
